John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless  restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do  to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut  anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." This, just a small excerpt from Steinbeck's novel, depicts the hardships and struggles that farmers faced during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. The Grapes of Wrath is an excellent source of information for this time period and includes historical facts, themes, and intricate details of living conditions of the migrant farmers.

John Steinbeck's portrayal of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl is quite accurate. His descriptions of the Dust Bowl, the causes and what the "bowl" looked like, were precise according to Alan Brinkley's text, The Unfinished Nation. Steinbeck and Brinkley both wrote that the worst drought in history had struck the Great Plains and lasted for a decade in the early 1930s. And at this time farmers had been tempted by high crop prices, which lead them to plow up the grass for more crop room and kept working the same crop, which eventually exhausted the soil. This and the lack of rainfall turned these regions into "virtual deserts," and the great winds caused the dust to blow across the plains in clouds. Steinbeck went into great detail describing what this had looked liked. In his novel he described the Dust Bowl: "The wind increased, steady, unbroken gusts. The dusts from the roads fluffed up and spread out and fell on the weeds besides the fields . . . the sky was darkened by...

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...OHHS AP/Pre-AP English Name Nicole Melendez Per. 6
Major Works Data Sheet: Fiction (Updated 4/6/2012)
Note: Cite references in MLA format, in-text, and parenthetically. Complete a Works Cited page of all references used.
| |Biographical information about the author: |
|Title: The Grapes ofWrath | |
|Author: John Steinbeck |John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California. Steinbeck went to Stanford |
|Date of Authorship: May - October 1938 |University however, he never graduated. He went to New York, in 1925, where he |
|Date of Original Publication: April 14, 1939 |tried to become a self-employed writer, but he was didn't succeed and decided |
|Genre: Epic, social commentary, realistic fiction |to return to California. He published some short stories and novel. However, in|
| |1935, Steinbeck became well-know for his book Tortilla Flat. Steinbeck’s novels|
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Grapes of Wrath History
John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath in response to the life of the people that lived in Oklahoma and traveled west to California. This book, which was written during the end of the dirty thirties, is filled with anger and hatred related to the dust bowl and the great depression times. Steinbeck strived for this novel to be his best he had ever written. He spent months researching how the people were treated during these times in order to enhance the emotions of the times. He desired to make sure that every detail he put in the book was true and relatable to the times. Steinbeck went to California in the late 1930’s. While he was there he decided to write this novel about the dust bowl and great depression migrants, and it remains an accurate description of great depression migrants who found themselves without options and opportunity, which caught the attention of many people.
The Great Depression caused many people to lose their jobs in Northern Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. Due to the loss of jobs people were forced to migrate west to California. It became very difficult for many migrants to find jobs and even places to live. They were paid little to nothing in wages, and were being watched and controlled in all the camps. If the people did anything wrong at these camps they were hurt by the men who policed the area. Steinbeck wanted to write this book...

...﻿Together We Can – A Research Essay on The Grapes of Wrath
The topic of this research essay is Tom Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, Jane Darwell as Ma Joad, and John Carradine as Casy. This movie effortlessly depicts the struggle of many Midwest families who were displaced in the 1940’s after the severe droughts and dust storms wreaked financial havoc on their farming lifestyles. Hoping to find better prospects out west, many families faced unimaginable conditions, hostility and even greater poverty along the way with no certainty of what lay ahead. In the classic film, The Grapes of Wrath, director Tom Ford shows that with unity, many conditions can be improved or overcome by the use of characterization, setting, and theme.
The movie The Grapes of Wrath was based on a novel that was written by John Steinbeck in 1939. Though fictional, the novel was inspired by actual events that occurred several years prior to being published. “Three years before the book was published a drought in the Dust Bowl states forced hundreds of thousands of migrants to California” (Neary, 1). These states included Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arkansas. The families moved because their way of life had drastically changed. They could no longer farm their lands and without work, there was no food. “It punctuated an environment of poverty, where...

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“If a man owns a little property, that property is him, it’s a part of him, and it’s like him… But let a man get property he doesn’t see, or can’t take time to get his fingers in, or can’t be there to walk on it—why, then the property is the man (Steinbeck 424).” This quote identifies the thought process of a tenant farmer being evicted from his home, the land he grew up on, in chapter five of John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck speaks of the relationships and humanity shown between the bank, landowners, and tenant farmers throughout this chapter. However, Steinbeck’s words can be interpreted to strongly support the tenant farmers, and get the reader to sympathize with the farmers as he hones in on their losses and their feelings. Throughout chapter five of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck presents the malice and inhumanity that greed can instigate by showing how the bigger power, the bank, can cause people to turn against people of a lower strata then themselves in order to get by. Through the viewpoint of the landowner, the tractor driver, and the farmer tenants, Steinbeck is able to get the readers to feel the callousness shown to the farmer tenants and the lack of power held by the landowners and tractor driver.
Steinbeck stresses the fact that the economic system victimizes all classes. The...

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The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The book The Grapes of Wrath is focused on the time period of The Great Depression and was published in 1939. The Great Depression was a time of poverty in the United States caused by a decline in farm prices and the crash. During the Great Depression most families had no one working, on some occasions one person was lucky enough to have a job. The one person with the job had the responsibility of providing food for the rest of the family on an extremely low budget. The migrants in The Grapes of Wrath or from a region referred to as the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl suffered because of farm price droppings and this caused owners to fire workers. The workers were forced to migrate down to California in hopes of finding a job along with all the other thousand workers searching for a job. During this time California’s population grew by 20% because of all the migrant workers who arrived searching for work. John Steinbeck’s writing focus a lot on California agriculture and it is shown within this book.
John Steinbeck was trying to reach the people who give up when situations get tough. Many families went through harsh moments on the way to California, but they always continued on their journey. Steinbeck wanted to present the struggle migrants went through to just try and survive. He also had hopes...

...Grapes of Wrath Long Research essay
One of the greatest historical fiction novels written, The Grapes of Wrath written by John Steinbeck, is not only vividly descriptive, but includes incredibly complex themes, allowing the reader to delve into the meaning endlessly. One of these themes discusses the liberation of women for men in the novel, a complex subject that Steinbeck envelopes in his story almost discreetly. The two main women in the novel that liberate them selves from men are Ma Joad and Rose of Sharon, neither liberation is extremely evident but both are complex.
Ma Joad is a wonderfully complex character in the Grapes of Wrath. In the very beginning of the novel Steinbeck states that she is a citadel, the center and last defense of the family. She is often known as the person who holds the Joads together through all the trials they face on their journey. Ma joad experienced liberation, in the case that she fills the role of Pa. It was never Ma Joads intention to take Pa Joads place in the family hierarchy, yet this is what happened when Pa could no longer fill his role. This was because Ma Joad cared for the wellness of others, all her goals were based on her family and wanting the best for them. On the other hand Pa Joads goals were very selfish and were very self-centered, based on proving his masculinity to his household and his community. Pa however failed in his...

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To human beings, environment is vital. After spending a number of years in one place, it is very human nature to become attached. This is especially true with farmers. They spend their lives learning the land around them. The land becomes a friend to them, having almost human value. In the novel The Grapes of Wrath, author John Steinbeck conveys the connection people have with their land, how big, greedy, corporations take that away, and how family unity provides the strength to overcome the hardships that are set in place by the corporations.
All humans think of a home as a place for comfort. They say that home is where you make it, but these farmers did not get that right away. In The Grapes of Wrath, the Oklahoma farmers feel they belong to the land and do not want to leave it. In response to Muley Graves' refusal to leave, Jim Casy says, "' Fella gets use' to a place, its hard to go'"(65). Muley's refusal to leave shows that he is physically and emotionally attached to the land he farmed before his eviction. It is illegal for him to remain on the land; yet, he cannot bring himself to leave his home. The land has become a part of him.
Human beings also can become proprietary about their land. They believe that the land belongs to them, and they belong to it. Before the Joad family is finished packing, Grampa decides he does not...

...Throughout John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, many concepts appear that were noted in How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster. However, the three chapters of Foster’s how-to guide that most apply to Steinbeck’s novel were “It’s All About Sex…,” “Every Trip is a Quest (Except When It’s Not),” and “It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow.” On more than one occasion these concepts are hidden within the book, and two of them actually seem somewhat linked together. After reading between the lines, The Grapes of Wrath has an extremely intricate plot and many ulterior meanings. Foster’s book helps to solve these meanings and make it so that the novel can be completely understood.
According to How to Read Literature Like a Professor, “sex doesn’t have to look like sex.” In fact, during the 1930’s when The Grapes of Wrath was published, writers weren’t allowed to include any straightforward sexual scenes in their novels. Writers then found a way to get around this restriction by hiding these scenes behind perfectly normal behavior. The first time this is seen in Steinbeck’s novel occurs in Chapter 15 when the Joad family stops at a small hamburger stand. In this stand, there are two employees, Mae and Al. Al clearly has feelings for the character Mae, feelings which Mae doesn’t notice. Steinbeck describes how Al “looks up at the vivaciousness in Mae’s voice.” He then goes...